Tavis Smiley to Gregoire: ‘Budgets are moral documents’

Gov. Chris Gregoire had spoken on education and departed from Seattle Pacific University’s annual business breakfast, but guest-of-honor Tavis Smiley followed with a message for the governor.

Smiley

“Budgets are moral documents,” Smiley, the public television talk show host and prolific author of 14 books.

Smiley said he’s just learned that thousands of people will be marching on the Washington State Capitol to protest against budget cuts in education and social services proposed by Gregoire and legislators.

Politicians can campaign and deliver speeches, he said, but: “We know who you really are when we see your budget.”

Smiley noted that Washington is a place with great wealth and cutting edge technology.

“Whatever problems you have in this state, at least you ain’t Mississippi, you ain’t Alabama, you ain’t Mississippi,” he joked.

The university’s annual Downtown Business Breakfast saw some hard warnings about the declining quality of education in America and Washington, but no discussion of what additional resources can be put into the fixing.

Philip Eaton, the president of SPU, recalled sitting beside China’s education minister at a dinner in Beijing, and being told that 300 million Chinese schoolchildren are learning English.

National commitment to education requires “a plan, a will and a determination,” added Eaton, elements being displayed by China but not in the United States.

“The crisis shows when our companies have jobs to offer and not enough quality graduates to fill them,” said Eaton.

While she has proposed cuts in K-12 education, and deep cuts and tuition hikes at the state’s public colleges, Gov. Gregoire depicted herself as an up-from-the-bootstraps product of American education.

“We cannot compromise education along the way,” said Gregoire.

The governor told of growing up in a single parent home, of the insistence by her waitress mother that she go to college, and how mother was “overwhelmed” to see daughter graduate from Gonzaga Law School.

And, said Gregoire, trade-dependent Washington can’t just match itself against other states in education achievement. “Our competition lies outside the United States,” she said.

The governor boosted her plan to create a single Department of Education to which all K-12 and higher education agencies — and Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn — would be subordinated.

He declared himself “heartened” at the demonstrators descending on Olympia. “Education in this country ought to be a right,” added Smiley. He took issue with the Obama Administration’s “Race To the Top” program, saying: “It suggests that education should be a race and not a right.”

(Bridgeport High School, in Bridgeport Wash., was selected Friday as one of six “Race to the Top” finalist high schools. The winner gets a presidential commencement address.)

Smiley talked about Washington’s wealth and the cutting edge companies headquartered in or launched from the Evergreen State — Starbuck’s, Microsoft, Amazon.com and Boeing.

We are lucky, he said, adding: “You know what they’ve got in Mississippi? Catfish!” Smiley claimed the whiskered fish are the number one export of the Magnolia state.